The inspirational story of Martyn Ashton, Danny MacAskill's mountain bike hero

Martyn Ashton with his Volvo Cannondale trials bike from circa 1997 at the Cycle Show, Alexandra Palace, London, April 2022 | Steve Behr / Stockfile

Some adjectives appear on book jackets so frequently that they begin to lose their meaning. If every work of fiction deemed “unputdownable” really was impossible to put down then half the world would be wandering around with books stuck to their hands. Similarly, when it comes to works of non-fiction – and memoirs in particular – the word “inspirational” is deployed with metronomic regularity. In the case of Lauren Davies’ new book Joyride, however, the publishers couldn’t really have got away with calling it anything else.

Subtitled “The Inspirational Story of Former World Mountain Bike Trials Champion Martyn Ashton”, the book begins in 2013, when Ashton broke his back after falling from his bike while performing a stunt on top of a van as part of a display on his Action Sports Tour at Silverstone. It then traces his story from that point up to the present – not his recovery; the injury leaves him permanently paralysed from the waist down, so there is no “recovery” to be made – but rather the long, hard process of learning to live from day to day without the use of his legs, and then his incredible quest to push the boundaries of what it’s still possible to achieve on a bike in spite of his very obvious limitations.

Ashton’s utter determination to get back on two wheels, born of a deep-seated love of cycling, is the most obviously inspirational thing about this book, but equally inspiring is the extent to which his achievement is a team effort. Davies is careful to show how, at every turn, while Ashton may be the engine providing the project’s momentum, it is his wife Lisa, his son Alfie and his close-knit circle of friends from within the biking community who collaborate to make it happen.

In this respect her choice of format for the book is well-judged: rather than trying to tell Ashton’s story in her own voice, Davies instead weaves together first person accounts from Ashton, his friends, family and medical team, with only occasional authorial interjections tying everything together.

Initially it’s Pete Tomkins, one of Ashton’s earliest sponsors, who made a fortune selling Crud Catcher mudguards, who steps in to design and build a specially modified 600cc Triumph motorbike for him, complete with “landing gear” stabilisers, which deploy whenever the bike comes to a halt to prevent it from toppling over. This proves to be a key moment. “Once I’d realised I could roll along and balance myself,” Ashton remembers, “that was the key to getting back on a mountain bike.”

At this point, no paraplegic had ever ridden a two-wheeled mountain bike before, partly because the implications of even a relatively minor injury for someone with no sensation below the waist could be extremely serious. For Ashton, though, a man who had lived and breathed mountain biking for much of his life, the risks seemed well worth taking.

This time, Ashton worked with Chris Porter, owner of Geometron Bikes, to come up with a concept that would allow him to remain in control while also “feeling as close to a non-adapted bike as possible.” Inspired by the Winter Paralympics, the pair decided to look at the bucket seats used on sit-skis and, as Porter explains, ended up making that the core of their design: “All we did was bolt that onto a bike with an electric motor, strapped him into it, taped his feet onto the pedals and pushed him off...”

The next step was for Ashton to ride an un-powered mountain bike on a downhill course, and this became the subject of his 2015 video Back on Track, which has now been viewed almost two million times on YouTube. Filmed by longtime collaborator Robin Kitchin, it shows Ashton riding his modified bike down the Antur Stiniog trail in North Wales, along with mountain bike superstar pals Danny MacAskill, Chris Akrigg and Blake Samson. The moment at the start, when his friends lift him out of his wheelchair and help him into his bike, then push him off down the trail, is as cathartic as they come.

MacAskill describes it as follows: “Pushing him off at the line, I know it sounds cheesy, but it was just like pure joy. It was like ‘and away you go!’ Then you're watching him and then you suddenly realise you have to run back and get your own bike and catch up.”

Originally from Skye, MacAskill became a YouTube sensation in 2009 after a video of him performing improbable-looking bike tricks all over Edinburgh went viral, and in his foreword to Joyride he explains how some of Ashton’s pre-accident videos inspired him to start pushing his own limits. But while Ashton clearly served as an inspiration to those in the mountain bike community before his accident, he now seems set to inspire many more people through his remarkable post-accident story.

Davies paints an honest, rounded picture of Ashton's journey, capturing both the euphoric ups and the spirit-crushing downs. What she conveys most powerfully, though, is Ashton’s admirable insistence on trying to live a life filled with gratitude for all that he still has, in spite of his accident – as he puts it, an understanding of “how truly great it is to be human and to have this moment at all.”

Joyride, by Lauren Davies, Pitch Publishing, £25